What was that John?

25102013

Back in the early 60’s John F. Kennedy asked us to ask not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. Apparently nobody was listening.

Since that time it would seem that people, most of who would claim to be his ardent supporters and admirers, have done the exact opposite of what he asked. They’ve demanded and taken a huge amount of this countries largess and still demand even more.

Once we touted that anything could be achieved by anyone willing to work to achieve it. Yes our government had a roll in that; to keep the playing field level and make sure that doors that were closed to some were opened. The belief that all men were created equally was an ideal and rightfully the fruits of that should be strived for.

Once charity here was a common virtue and great things were accomplished or built out of the willingness of people to do good works for the benefit of others. Almost all libraries, schools, and hospitals started out as church or charitable institutions. Funded by people and organizations they served their communities and did untold good for the masses.

At some point however someone decided that reliance on charity alone wasn’t the proper way of taking care of one’s neighbor, that it was an obligation. That would seem a fair enough pretext one would think. This was a great and powerful country, prosperous, and founded on the highest of ideals. Certainly one would think that the public good worthy of the public resource, wouldn’t they?

What nobody was perhaps counting on was the notion of entitlements and rights. What was once something worth striving for became something expected. One shouldn’t be demanded of to earn certain things, they should have them provided as some birthright. Some things one should have just because. Those things that charity took care of became an obligation, and that obligation a fulfillment of a demand.

Today we have so many “rights” (read that as entitlements) that we can barely afford the things a government actually exists for much less those things that caused us to be such a great and powerful nation to begin with. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Money once spent on developing our future now goes for things such as cell phones for the poor. Things done for the “common good” of the people, roads, bridges, ports, airports, etc. etc., we can’t find the money for. Our military even struggles now to make ends meet.

We’ve minimum waged our senior citizens into the poorhouse. We’ve virtually destroyed our educational system. We’ve created a monster called political correctness which inhibits thoughts and actions, and stifles innovation least it offends some obscure niche somewhere. And we’ve silence reasonableness in favor of radicalization.

We’ve raised up a generation of people that no longer understand what communism and socialism is and the pitfalls of each. They don’t understand that those systems collapsed under their own weight and now we race headlong toward that very same end, as if it’s all shiny and new.

Even now people in our government seek out new entitlements to add as we go deeper and deeper into debt as a nation. Close to 17 trillion dollars in debt, yet they seek out even more largess for the people. Yet nobody asks what the people will do when it comes to an end.